Really Being There
By Will Richardson for Malemen magazine
I’m breaking out in a cold sweat. How can music be atonal if it has a tone? Shoenberg’s question. Not mine. But this thought is running—jogging really—through my mind, along with a slight hangover, as I prepare to talk to someone who should know, the highly esteemed Phill Niblock. Indeed I’m fortuitously equipped with precisely the kind of dull throbbing pain in the temples that springs to mind when trying to categorize the avant-garde. I’m almost tempted to say, I know what I like when I see and hear it. All kidding aside, the how do you define the avant-garde. If you could define it, then it wouldn’t be avant-garde, would it?
(Besides, isn’t it the constant modern preoccupation with classifying everything that is behind that dull headache that troubles all those sleeping and waking hours spent sober?)
The celebrated Phil Niblock and Heiner Goebbels are two of the artists appearing at the 54th Warsaw International Festival of Contemporary Music (16th to the 24th of September). The festival features “music that does not focus exclusively on itself but opens on the surrounding world, commenting on it and attempting to change it.”
More cold sweat. And this from a guy who sang boy soprano in Pendecki’s Passion of St. Luke. O Crux! Indeed.
But as we say in English, let’s get to the crux, the heart of the matter.
This year’s performances will highlight contemporary social and political issues including child soldiers in Africa and human trafficking as well as less terrifying, yet determinedly relevant topics such as the phenomenon of leisure time in modern culture and combating barbarism and cynicism through art in the 21st century. There will also be a series of orchestral and piano concerts including a first-ever performance of Andrzej Krzanowki’s Symphony No. 1 (1975). And, yes, there will be a soupcon of Stockhausen.
The affable and engaging Mr. Niblock will be presenting The Movement of People Working, a concert-installation using electronic sound and three video screens, while Mr. Goebbel’s contribution will be Songs of Wars That I Have Seen with a text by Gertrude Stein accompanied by the London Sinfonietta. Both productions have won acclaim from critics.
But what does it all mean? Both Niblock and Goebbels would tend to say, “That’s up to you.” And they would be right.
This may sound evasive but with both artists, critics and audiences, tend to go with the flow seeking their own personal connection and sense of purpose. Both artists defy classification and intend to keep things that way. And perhaps that is a good thing in a world gone mad with the instant gratification of neat classification. In Lady Gaga Land where total nonsense treated seriously in order to roll out the big bucks and where even the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and Beatles (Hell the Sex Pistols!) have started to look positively Mozartian, a dose of the abstruse may be just the antidote.
I’ll leave it to you.
While Goebbels work weaves its way between the three conventions of opera, theatre and orchestra, Niblock’s métier is video accompanied by minimalist shifts in musical tone which suggest an audible version of the earth’s hum, which scientists have recently. But more of Mr. Goebbels, who was unavailable for interview at press time, later. . .
Phill Niblock was born in Anderson, Indiana, a city of 75,000, near Indianapolis, which was dominated by General Motors when he was growing up. Both his father, an engineer and his grandfather, a laborer, worked at GM, but “I escaped,” says Phill. After leaving the army in 1958, he moved from Indiana to New York, where he worked as a photographer and filmmaker, focusing particularly on jazz musicians including the inimitable Sun Ra and his “Arkestra.” He even used to run into Moondog, the blind and legendary street musician, who dressed as the Viking of Sixth Avenue who was an influence on minimalists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich at Julliard. Moondog was the man. Even Janis Joplin covered one of his songs.
“I never got into Moondog,” Phill Niblock says to me.
Hey, wait a minute! The avant-garde, just like civilian life, is a minefield. So be it.
In the early seventies, Phill began filming The Movement of People Working in mostly rural settings across the world including Japan, China, Brazil, Portugal, Lesotho, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, the Arctic, Mexico, Hungary, the Adirondacks, and Peru. The films show everyday people doing everyday work—particularly their hands and bodies. He shoots only countryside material, nothing industrial. The films go from coastal sands to the high mountains. The sound is up to the perceiver. The film material, too, is quite neutral. There is no attempt to look at personality. You rarely see faces.
Whatever the locale, these vivid films use long takes in high resolution to catch the movement of human beings doing manual labor. There is no contextual meaning, Phill says. Music and video combine to in varying simplicity to create empathy with the rhythm and form of the human hands in motion. They are amazing, especially in a world where Carpal tunnel syndrome is more common than a callous. For example, the foundations of marshy St. Petersburg were built on millions and millions of handfuls of clay carried by slaves.
Cut to today.
It’s Sunday midday in July when I skype Phill, who is basking in the sunlight of Calabria, recovering from last night’s performance and the wine that followed. In Warsaw the heavens have opened and the rain is pouring down. Like a monsoon. It’s as dark as Italy must be light.
“So how are you doing today after last night’s performance?”
“Slightly hungover,” says Phill, who is always present on stage at his computer guiding the show. He has to be present for the thing to happen. The music is played from recorded digital files.
“That’s great. Me too,” I say, relieved. “So where exactly are you?”
“I’m in the soul of Italy. That’s the ball of the foot where the most weight is carried.”
“First, a disclaimer, even though I’m looking forward to seeing your show, I’m not sure I have a clue about what minimalism really is. I’m a rock and roller, a blues guy.”
“That explains the hangover,” says Phill.
“What about yours?”
“Too much good wine,” he says.
“Anyway it’s a pleasure to talk to you. Have you ever been to Poland or should I ask how many times?”
Phill laughs. “My first time was 1985. That was of course a very different time. I came to see Krzystoff Knittel. He was very involved in Solidarity and doing some really underground stuff to support the movement. . . It was a fantastic time . . . He was the only real contact I had in Poland . . . I drove in and parked my car and did a concert in a secret location.”
The Movement of the People Working is his magnum opus, if you will. But how was it inspired?
“I guess it was inspired by my being tired of photographing dance. I had worked from the mid-sixties until mid-seventies at Judson Dance Theatre as resident cinematographer . . . Eventually, I wanted to do something I could handle alone . . . The natural movement of people is much more interesting than the artificial movement of dance.”
“What will we see in Warsaw?”
“I normally show more than one film and as many as six at one performance. The longest are two hours. We will show three in Warsaw most likely China from ‘88, Japan from ‘89 and maybe Brazil or Mexico. We will use four-meter screens in Warsaw but the size varies depending on the venue. We did a show in September in Milan that had six five meter screens.”
“Is there any overwhelming theme you want to convey?”
“It’s political,” says Phill. “I don’t like to define it. Some people see it as socialist. I see it as people doing hard work.”
It may be political but it’s also uncannily topical. The Japan film was shot 22 years ago in the exact area where the tsunami struck in March.
Phill Niblock may live mostly in a world entirely of his own making, but he is very much concentrated on the outside world. Yet, he doesn’t watch TV. He doesn’t read newspapers and magazines, nor listen to radio or popular music. . .
No TV?
“I don’t see TV as art,” he says. “The news is disposable. Oh, everyone couple of months I buy a copy of the International Herald Tribune,” he says. “I don’t ever watch movies . . . People send me things, but I don’t watch. I do listen to music because I can do that while I’m editing. I don’t want to spend time watching TV and films. Id rather work than watch.”
“So you are the opposite of Peter Seller’s in Being There? You are more about really being there.”
He laughs again. At 77, he stays as busy as ever. He produces performance and visual art events in New York and Ghent. He has been touring eight months of the year since 1997. His next big project is a new orchestra piece being done in Prague, then a festival in Milan.
One last question: why the focus on hands instead of faces?
“Hands express a lot about people, especially in Italy,” he says with a chuckle.
Indeed.
Then there is the intriguing Mr. Goebbels who walks the tightrope of the avant-garde. Roll up for the magical mystery tour because “Songs of Wars I Have Seen,” is one of the more conjured and mysterious trips one can take in a concert hall.
Goebbel’s composition takes both title and text from Gertrude Stein’s 1945 Paris memoir, “Wars I Have Seen,” which premiered at the Southbank Hall in London in 2007. Anyone familiar with Stein’s work will know that though she was tutor to Hemingway in the 1920s, her writing was often purposely nonsensical, perhaps the word equivalent of atonal music. Perhaps. She did come up with some seminal catchphrases including “a rose is a rose is a rose,” her prime example of how to write about things as they are without describing the way they are.
Goebbel’s stage consists of two parts, the foreground “living room” in which female instrumentalists sit. Behind them is a group of male wind players and percussionists in black dress. The “songs,” are said without emotion by the female instrumentalists, except for one piece spoken by the male percussionist. The setting suggests, women commenting on war while men make the big noises. The music includes 18th century orchestral music, techno-electronics, and a trumpet solo over the ringing of Tibetan prayer bowls. Notwithstanding this, the piece has something of the feel of Thelonious Monk on acid about it.
Goebbels drew early inspiration from Eisler, a Shoenberg disciple and long-time collaborator with Brecht. Despite being influenced by the Beatles and the Beach Boys as a teenager, which he played every day at the piano, he’s known for valuing a mixture of styles, his trademark, including classical music, jazz, and rock, whilst composing music for theatre, film, and ballet.
His work, even that of his eighties rock band, Cassiber, is undeniably unforgettable. Some of Cassiber, for example, Start the Show and A Screaming Comes Across the Sky, off his A Face We All Know CD, sound something like the great Captain Beefheart played backwards. Which definitely is special.
Both artists are sincere in their rejection of mainstream artistic and political values. Both are truly committed not just to being there, to filling space, but to challenging the freeway of popular culture by taking the scenic view of the abyss from the high road. Nothing wrong with that. Both are determined to find a way of really being there. That’s doesn’t sound just high-toned. It sounds, dare I say it, revolutionary.
Or at the very least, evolutionary.
And now I’m going to go soak my head in a tub of ice-cubes. See you at the festival.